The Peculiar Pets of Miss Pleasance (4 page)

“Of course. Dueling pianos. One stage, two instruments, two master musicians.” He must have noted her going nearly rigid. “Oh, honey. You didn’t think I meant a duel—with swords? No way. I’m a lover, not a fighter. Most of the time.”

Frannie took a long, deep breath, feeling the blood rush back into her extremities. That’s all it took—a single word—to send her right back to that day in the park. To the red blood against sooty snow, to a cruel laugh, a sneer, and a dark, twirly mustache that had made her forever hateful of facial hair. She hadn’t been back there since. Hadn’t been much of anywhere, other than her usual errands, all of them to unthreatening shopkeepers and along walkways safe from the city’s dandies and devils.

“You really should come. My contract stipulates a box for my use, and I’ll put your name on it. You can bring your friends.”

Frannie snorted. “What friends? Maisie next door? A basket of kittens?”

“It’s a box, darlin’. Bring the entire shop, if you can keep the parrots quiet.”

“I’ll think about it,” she finally said.

But she knew the sort of person who lurked around Casper’s innocent little musicales, and she didn’t ever want to see that mustache again. Was it better to seem a coward or come face-to-face with the man who’d ruined her life?

6

Her coin had more than done its work. Three more street urchins arrived that day bearing lost and confused birds. One brought half of a dead parakeet and a hopeful smile, but Frannie sent him away with her secondary order: they only counted if they were whole and alive.

The kittens were brightening up, so she settled them into a bin, glad to be relieved of the basket for the first time in a week. On a whim, she gave them a bit of mushed-up fish and milk to see if they were ready for real food, and they fell to it like thieves. One less thing to worry about. All in all, business was going well, and by the end of the day, she’d paired city folks with animals they considered magical, pocketing a decent bit of coin in the process.

Crows and owls were quite popular with magicians, scholars, and daimons, while the rich families lined up for kittens and puppies. The middle class had to settle for creatures small and bright—parakeets, dragon lizards, canaries, and the occasional tortoise. She would take almost any unbludded animal her vendors could deliver still breathing. Over the years, she’d seen dozens of the expected creatures, not to mention rare and exotic pets such as spotted mice, dodo birds, living monkeys, snakes, and, once, a patchy leopard cub she’d spruced up and taken to the zoo for an enormous profit. After coaxing her new charges into excellent health with her father’s secret lore, she sold them fairly quickly. That was one reason she never got too attached to her creatures: they never stayed.

Except Filbert. He rode in her pocket all day, even for the morning’s errands. She’d held herself aloof for so long that it felt odd to have someone constantly around, even if it was just a kitten.

After closing shop for the night, she went up to the attic and brought down the ancient dress form and sewing kit. The old dress from the back of her closet felt strange in her hands, the shimmering indigo fabric light and fresh and crisp compared with her mother’s old tweeds. She’d thrown out all her bright dresses right after Bertram’s funeral, except for this one. Considering carefully the fashions she saw daily on her customers, she made a few changes to the design, moving the ruffles and ribbons around and including a pocket for Filbert. She had spent far too much on this dress, back when Bertram had been alive and the shop had still been in the good part of town and they had barely been able to keep the cages full, so quickly were the animals sold. And although she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t tossed it out with all the others, she was glad to have at least one thing in the closet that wasn’t brown. No one wore brown to the theater.

Once she heard the back door close behind Casper, she set the dress aside and crept downstairs for her final check that all was in place. The pet shop was warm and rustling, comfortable. She lived in fear that a bludrat would find its way in and massacre her world, despite the tight-as-a-drum design of the room. She couldn’t have traps, of course, since a curious kitten could fall victim all too easily to one of the huge, crude affairs meant to crush bludrats in one snap.

The shop was tidy, most of the creatures sleeping. A secretive smile came over her face as she realized that with Casper gone, she could finally sneak through the hidden door in her closet. She had business to attend to on the roof, after all.

Hours later, as she prepared to drag herself inside and into bed, her eye was caught by a movement on the next roof over, down on Maisie’s building. Frannie’s row house had the tallest façade on the block, but there were decorative windows in the brick to encourage proper air flow. She could easily see what occurred on all the other roofs, which was mostly nothing. She glanced over, hopeful that perhaps the last of her clever crows had found its way home, but the shadow was gone. Strange that anyone or anything else would be about on the roof, in the milky light of the moon. She waited a while longer until a yawn nearly cracked her jaw, then finally went inside and gave in to sleep.

When Thom arrived the next morning, Frannie was sweeping the shop for the third unnecessary time. His knock was soft, and the first rays of the sun barely painted him pink when she unlocked the door and shyly let him in. Thom was wearing a different skirt this time—a kilt, she reminded herself. Her curiosity had been piqued by their last conversation, and she had looked up Edinburgh in her atlas to brush up on what little she had been taught about Scotland. For a country that was bloody close, things up north were terribly strange, and men with bare knees were the least of it. Compared with the native creatures of his homeland, bludrats attacking his skin must have seemed but a minor inconvenience. He certainly didn’t seem concerned about his shocking state of undress.

Clad all in grays and browns, he almost melded with the dreary stones and fug of London. His eyes were the lone bit of nature, warmly hazel. He grinned at her, and when he spoke, his voice was soft enough to keep from riling up the still-sleepy creatures.

“Ready to do some work, lass?”

“I am. Are you sure you don’t mind?”

In response, he shrugged amiably and scratched his chin. He looked remarkably awake and tidy for someone who’d been fighting fires all night, but she handed him her flask anyway.

“Bit early for whiskey, aye?” he said, but then he smelled it and murmured approvingly. “Coffee.” He sipped it. “With goat milk?” He drew back to look at her, and she smiled smugly.

“I have my ways,” she said, enjoying his incredulity. For a quiet London lass in a dowdy tweed suit, she held quite a few secrets. As long as Thom never found his way to the roof, she didn’t have much to fear.

“I’ve brought a bit of wood and glass and my kit. Mind if I bring it into the shop before we head upstairs to assess the damage? Never seen a city with such sticky fingers. They’d steal the hoses off the truck, if we weren’t careful.”

He eased a cart through the door, careful of the old boards and wrapped bit of glass. Frannie locked the door behind him, an oddly intimate gesture in the dusky morning. It was even stranger when he followed her past the curtain and up the narrow steps to the upstairs hall and into her room. The last time a man had been in there, the ensuing kerfuffle had ended worse than badly.

Thom went first to the window, his brow furrowing as he ran a leather-gloved finger over the jagged, fire-darkened remains of the glass.

“I couldn’t really see the damage last night, but the Brigade didn’t do this. Did you break it trying to escape?”

Frannie came closer but didn’t reach out to touch the thick, wavy glass. It wasn’t the newer, thinner glass that one could easily see through, but had been original to the house, too heavy to let in anything but a token bit of light.

“I didn’t touch the glass. There was smoke everywhere, and the curtains were on fire. I didn’t even look, really. But it would have taken a lot of force to do this much damage, correct? It’s as thick as my thumb!”

Thom looked out the window, mindful of the scorched shards as he scouted along the street below. Much to Frannie’s surprise, he dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl around on the fire-blackened wood boards. She hadn’t installed her new curtains yet, and the light through the broken glass laid the room’s every fault bare. She was mortified when he stuck his head under the bed; surely the neglected dustbunnies were one step away from craving blood.

When Thom emerged holding a crude device of charred metal and fabric, Frannie was more confused and embarrassed than concerned. After all, she hadn’t moved her bed a single time in her entire life, and she hadn’t spent much time poking around under there, either. Having grown up with a mortal fear of bludrats, hanging about under a pitch-dark bed wasn’t something that interested her.

“Tell me, lass. D’ye have any enemies?”

“Not to my knowledge.” She had many secrets, but no one knew about them. And if anyone did, setting her home and shop on fire would have rendered them useless, anyway. “What is that thing?”

Thom stood, turning the object over in his dusty leather gloves. Although he held it easily in one large hand, when he gave it to her, she needed both hands to manage the size and weight of it.

“An incendiary device.” She cocked her head at him and raised an eyebrow, a trick she had picked up from the parrots. He moved closer, his arm brushing hers, to point at a blackened, pointy part. “Bit like a fire lighter. See, here, where the bit of slate strikes the flint? My best guess is that someone threw it through your window while it was on fire. That would explain why the flames were concentrated on the curtains, aye?”

Frannie handed it back to him, noting that for a fellow who seemed rustic and rough, his vocabulary was rather crisp. She stood before the window, the skin crawling on her neck as she thought about the only person who’d ever tried to hurt her. But this—this wasn’t his style. She was fairly certain it couldn’t be the neighbors, either. The building across the street was owned by a baker, and she knew the family well enough to be sure the device hadn’t originated there. In any case, the baker’s roof was sloped, not high and flat like her own.

“It must have come from the street,” she said. “But why me? The shop’s worth nothing burned.”

He shrugged, his shoulders stretching the gray coat. “Plenty of arson in this city, most of it never explained to my satisfaction. Did you sleep here last night?”

She blushed and stared at the bed, which was stripped to an old, singed sheet over the striped mattress.

“Of course ye didn’t. Good. Ye never know when they’ll try again. I’ll speak to the local Copper, make sure someone patrols this street at night. Have you considered barring the windows? Or setting a clockwork to guard?”

“My family has been here for thirty years without a single problem. This part of town is still good.” Her glare dared him to disagree, but he only raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never felt unsafe before.” She swallowed, crossing her arms over her chest as she stared at the cold, charred incendiary device. Metal was so impersonal. “Not like this.”

Thom set the device down on her bed and stepped closer. His hand half-lifted from his side, but in the end, he didn’t touch her.

“You’re scared of something more than the fire, lass. What’s amiss?”

She hugged herself and tried to smile, although it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.”

“Was it that rakehell with the floofy shirt? Because I’ll turn his face into liver.”

She couldn’t help laughing, which surprised him. “He couldn’t hurt a fly, that one. Not my type, anyway. All bluster and no blood, as my father used to say.”

His eyes were crow-sharp, considering. “So you two . . . aren’t involved?”

“I took him in like a dying dog, and he’s paying me well to sleep in an empty room. That’s the depth of our involvement.” Looking up at him, she fluttered her eyelashes just a bit and said, “Why do you ask?”

He cleared his throat and stepped closer still. Frannie couldn’t help responding to his closeness, to the bulk of him and a warmer-than-warm radiance that made her think of the sun shining on the ocean. He smelled a little like heather and violets and salt, and she could tell the sea had suited him. As much as something about Casper pushed her away, something about Thom beckoned her closer.